Chapter 13
I need to get out of this house.
Not because of Mateo. He’s at the forge, and the place is quiet and comfortable and smells like coffee and him.
But I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for an hour staring at my laptop screen, and the cursor hasn’t moved.
I mean, it blinks at me like it’s counting down every second toward my demise, but it hasn’t actually moved across the page.
The town hall speech draft is open in one tab.
My KDP dashboard is open in another tab.
My Sienna Saguaro social media accounts are open in the third, fourth, and fifth.
And I haven’t written a word of fiction in over two weeks.
Two weeks. That’s the longest I’ve gone without writing since I moved to Sierra Rose. Even when Owen was at his worst, I wrote. Late at night, after he’d fallen asleep. Early mornings before he woke up. Any moment where he wasn’t immediately there to criticize.
And now everyone knows it exists. Somehow, that’s made it harder, not easier.
I close the laptop, grab my notebook and a pen, and pick up my car keys from the counter.
I scribble a note before walking out the door, and take the thirty-minute drive.
I don’t plan the route consciously, but my hands know where to turn, and when the dirt road narrows, and the desert scrub gives way to the rocky trail leading up to the Red Rock Cliffs overlook, I realize where I’ve been heading all along.
Of course. Where else would I go?
I park and climb out. The wind is sharper up here, carrying the kind of cold that bites through flannel and reminds you that the desert doesn’t care about your feelings.
She’s a bitch like that, but I love her nonetheless.
The sky is enormous. Pale blue streaked with white.
It’s the kind of sky that makes you feel both insignificant and infinite at the same time.
The overlook is empty. It’s just me and the rocks and the view.
Sierra Rose Ridge sprawls below, small and perfect.
I can see the town square from here, the cluster of adobe buildings along Main Street, the glint of the winery’s greenhouse on the eastern hillside.
Thankfully, the boarded-up windows of Wildflower Books are blocked by other buildings, but I know they’re there.
Two dark rectangles where light used to pour in.
I find a flat rock near the edge—not too close, I’m not that dramatic or brave—and settle against a larger boulder. The stone is sun-warmed despite the cool air. I pull my knees up and open the notebook on my lap.
This is where Rosa Delgado stood.
I mean, not this exact rock, probably. But somewhere on this ridge, over a hundred years ago, a woman who loved someone so fiercely she couldn’t survive losing him made a choice I can’t ever imagine making.
The town carries her name. The legend carries her grief.
And I wrote about her in my book, sitting here without ever really considering what it meant.
Until now.
I’ve been coming up here since my first year in Sierra Rose Ridge. It’s where I outlined Wildfire Summer and where I figured out the ending of my second book. It’s where I come when the words won’t move, and I need the sky to be bigger than my problems.
The pen hovers over the blank page.
I’m here to write.
Book two. The one readers are already asking about. The one I promised myself I’d start drafting as soon as Wildfire Summer launched, before everything went sideways.
The problem is, every time I try to start, I hear voices. Not the characters’ voices—those I’d welcome. No, I hear my mother’s. Owen’s. Judith’s. Karen Voss, David Torres, and every anonymous commenter who called me a whore for writing love stories.
Pornography.
Degrading.
Who’s going to buy books from the woman who wrote porn about their town?
SLUT.
WHORE.
WE DON’T WANT YOU HERE.
I press the pen to the page and write a sentence.
It’s bad. Stiff and self-conscious, like I’m writing with someone looking over my shoulder.
I cross it out and try again.
Worse.
I set the pen down and look out over the valley. The wind picks up, tugging at the pages of my notebook. Below me, Sierra Rose goes about its day. Cars are moving along Main Street. A truck pulls into the winery parking lot.
My town. The town that’s trying to decide if I belong here.
Except that’s not quite right anymore, is it? The town has already decided. The meeting hasn’t happened yet, but Carol’s on my side. Lin’s on my side. Mayor Benally doesn’t seem to be on Judith’s side.
Mateo, Jess, Macy, Isabel, Dean… they’ve all shown me where they stand.
The people who hate me are loud, but they’re not the majority. They never were. I just couldn’t hear anything else over the noise.
I pick up the pen again.
This time, I don’t think about who might read it or who might hate it.
I think about the woman who sat at her desk two years ago and wrote the first line of Wildfire Summer because she’d fallen in love with a town and a man she didn’t realize she was falling for, too.
And the only way to survive was to put it on the page.
That woman didn’t write for anyone’s approval. She wrote because the story was there and it needed to come out.
I write a line.
Then another.
They’re not perfect. The opening of book two is rough and probably wrong, and I’ll rewrite it six times before it sticks.
But the words are moving. The pen is scratching across the page.
And somewhere between the second paragraph and the third, the voices in my head go quiet, and the only voice left is the one telling the story.
I write for an hour. Maybe longer. I lose track of time, as I always do, when the writing is working.
Those moments where the world narrows to the page, and everything else falls away.
The cold. The wind. The town below. All of it disappears until it’s just me and the characters and the story unfolding in real time under my hand.
When I finally stop, my hand is cramped, and I’ve filled seven pages. Not all of it is good. Some of it is downright terrible. But it’s there. Words on a page. My words.
I look at what I’ve written. The new hero is a blacksmith. That wasn’t intentional—it just happened, the way the best writing decisions do. His hands are rough and careful. He works with fire. He’s patient in a way that seems still but is actually restraint.
I’m not even pretending it’s not Mateo.
The sun has shifted while I was writing. The light is warmer now, more gold than white, and the red rocks around me are starting to glow the way they do in late afternoon. That color made me fall in love with this place the first time I saw it.
I close the notebook and hold it against my chest. Seven pages. A beginning.
They didn’t silence me. I can still sit on the ridge where Rosa Delgado grieved and choose to write about love.
I drive back to Mateo’s house with the windows down despite the cold, letting the desert air whip through my hair.
I find him in the kitchen, pulling something out of the oven. He looks up when I come through the door, and his eyes do that thing, that quick scan, not cataloging flaws but checking that I’m okay. Making sure I came back in one piece.
“Hey.” He sets the dish on the counter. “I was starting to wonder where you went.”
“The cliffs.”
His eyebrows rise slightly. “By yourself?”
“By myself.” I set the notebook on the kitchen table. “I wrote.”
He looks at the notebook, then at me. His face softens in a way that tells me he’s been waiting for this and didn’t want to be the one to suggest it.
“Yeah?” he says quietly.
“Seven pages. They’re mostly terrible.” I smile. “But they’re there.”
He crosses the kitchen and kisses me. Just that. Arms on my waist, anchoring me. Gentle, warm, and proud without making it bigger than it needs to be.
“Good,” he says. “That’s good, tesoro.”
And he’s right. It is.